But I've found it has a power to change my life and the world around me so profoundly and I'd like to share it with you. Before this story began, Patti and Jack and Frank and I had what we would have called a normal life in Greenwich Village in a nice apartment. Patti was a stylist, running around Manhattan collecting fashionable clothes and props for photo shoots. I was a busy guy, running around to meetings and shoots of my own. Jack was little baby, just 10 months old, busy figuring out how to walk. Frank was the only Zen member of our family, an eight-year-old mutt who knew how to relax. If you'd met us then, we would have told you we're happy but a little too busy to talk about it.

One hot and busy morning, Patti left Jack with a babysitter and walked to the subway station near our house; she was headed to a chic uptown bakery to get a cake for a photo shoot.

While waiting for the train, she fell onto the tracks just as the #9 train pulled into the station. The engineer slammed on the brakes but too late. Three subway cars rolled over Patti's body, crushing her spinal cord and paralyzing her from the waist down.

Everybody we knew was stunned. Patti was vivacious, cute, stylish, and a new mom. This sort of thing just didn't happen to people like us.

In the hospital, Patti asked me "Why?" Why had this happened to her and to us? I said, "I don't care." If this was God's idea of a lesson or a punishment for a former life's transgressions, well, I wasn't interested. There couldn't be an explanation that I could be bothered to accept. I was dazed and mad. What I needed to know was "what next?" How do we remake our lives and be happy again? How do we get outta here?!?

While Patti was in the hospital, Jack and I logged lots of hours in our old cowboy rocker. He would lean back against my chest, and we would listen to music or read a book. When he fell asleep, I would rock and wonder what would become of me.

I had no way to think about my life anymore. I didn't know anyone who was married to a cripple. I didn't know anyone who was disabled at all. I thought of myself as this new thing, pushing a wheelchair around for the rest of my life. All our plans and dreams were destroyed, and I was trapped under the avalanche.

Each day I rushed around, dealing with my job, with the hospital, with Jack, taking control and figuring out logistics. But each night, I sat in the rocker feeling sorry for myself in this horrible new life I had imagined for myself.

After two months in rehab, Patti came home. Our apartment was a duplex, so I lugged her up and down the stairs to our bedroom. We began to develop new routines, reinventing even the most basic functions of life: getting dressed, cooking dinner, playing, making love.

The accident wasn't the only thing on my mind during those brownish days. I managed to start worrying about my job quite a bit. What was the point of my work? What if I got fired? Could we cope with being homeless?

My hypochondria began to flare up, and I suddenly wondered if something horrible would happen to my health next. And should we be living in the city? Would Jack become stunted? What was the point of love? Was love worth it if the #9 train could come along and take it all away? Was my existential angst just another burden for Patti?

Everything seemed up for questioning, and I was a mess.

So, I looked for answers in any book with a promise on its dust jacket.

At work, I made my colleagues nervous. If I tried to talk about the accident, about how I felt... they fell silent. I could hardly blame them and was grateful that they obviously cared. It all seemed so vast, way beyond the small talk and gossip that we usually shared. Our friends were supportive. So was our family. But I had to tread a fine line. If I told them my life was a meaningless hell, they would surely have freaked out. If I acted like I was totally OK, I'd seem superhuman, out of the woods, or deep in denial.

While I was looking so frantically for meaning Patti was getting on with her life. She was working, making new friends, bonding with Jack, healing. She was a new person to me, with all the things I'd loved about her since we'd met combined with new courage and resolve. I was rather in awe of her and felt all the more pathetic because, after all, the accident was hers and I was only a bystander, really.

A story a disabled friend told me:

A couple were going on a vacation to Italy. For months, they'd been thinking about the rich food, the wine, the warm beaches of Capri, the bustle of Rome, the passion of the Sicilians. When they got off the plane, however, their itinerary had been changed. They were in Holland. Gray and flat. The people were bland and so was the food. Instead of beaches, there were dykes, for crissakes.

The couple freaked out. This sucked. This wasn't the vacation they'd been looking forward to. They complained but nothing could be done. They were stuck in Holland. Tough luck.

But then something happened to the couple. They started to love Holland. The pace was slower and more mellow, the people radiated calm. They found a new world: Rembrandt and Alkmaar and Hutspot and ancient coffee houses and the tulips of Keukenhof. In the end, they had a wonderful vacation. It wasn't what they'd been counting on. But it was great, nonetheless.

"Holland," my friend told me, "is where you and Patti have been dropped off. The world of disability. It's not what you'd planned on, it's not fast and furious like the life you led, but it is deep and rich and you will learn to live in it and to love it."

I've always made things. Little books, sculptures, meals, doodles. I've never thought of myself as an artist. My father calls it "the curse of the Gregorys," this drive to always make things oout of other things. My grandfather spent years trying to make a machine that would produce a little brass ship when you turned its crank. He never succeeded but his house was always full of partially formed little brass boats. My father starts every single day by painting a self-portrait and writes software no one ever sees. My uncle is a potter and has loads of kids. Eventually, a couple of years after the accident, I found myself making things in earnest again. I learned to bind books. Then to throw pots. And I wrote reams in my journals.

Then one evening I decided to teach myself to draw. I had always doodled on spare scraps of paper, grotesque heads, spirals, grids, that sort of thing. But now I committed to drawing the things around me, sticking to studies of real things.

My first efforts were horrible. But one quiet evening, I drew Patti while she sat on the couch, out of her wheelchair.

Something about that drawing was different from anything I'd done before. I took my time and then suddenly I zoned out. My mind went blank, my breathing slowed, and when I finally stopped to look at my page, I was amazed that I had managed to create anything so beautiful. At first it seemed a fluke, but then I drew the contents of our medicine cabinet (slowly, slowly), and again I saw something new. (You can see it too, on the next page).

What was different was not the drawing but the seeing. I caressed what I drew with my eyes, lingering over every curve and bump, gliding around contours and into shadows. No matter what I looked at in this way, I saw beauty and felt love. It was very weird but it happened again and again. When I slowed way down and let my mind go, I had the same incredibly sensual experience. It didn't matter what I drew. I then I discovered that it didn't matter what the drawing was like. In fact, I could simply toss it away, like the skin of a banana.

What mattered was the slow, careful gaze.

Excerpted from EVERYDAY MATTERS by Danny Gregory. Copyright 2007 Danny Gregory. All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion. Available wherever books are sold.